Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (49 page)

This eternal female mystery, the omnipotence of whose manifestations overmasters the human being, is that which constantly arises before the eyes of the artist, and it is that which makes such critics as the clergyman I am speaking of now affirm that Decadent art has eyes and ears only for the colors and sounds of sensuality. Where is one to turn one’s gaze, though, so as not to come under the influence of Eves and Venuses? Where is a man of flesh and blood not to find the red eyes of the mysterious serpent? That is why great artists—at once strong and delicate—are seized by an invincible obsession, for every great artist is a solitary in his Thebais or on his Zenobii, and it is solitaries who are visited by the invisible, unknown forces, whether they be in the form of the tempting devil or the divine
daimon.

Thus Huysmann, thus poor grand Verlaine, thus Gabriel d’Annunzio.

RANVIER

His is not the triumphant Bacchus that marched off to India, embossed upon vases and medals; his, not the great obese Bacchus crowned with clusters of grapes, that god painted by a court painter to please an imperial prince. Following his inspiration, Ranvier has chosen his subject from the mythology of ancient Greece, and its central figure is a strong, jolly god at the very moment of his birth—hatched from the thigh of father Jupiter like a chick from the egg, the son of Semele, as he is portrayed on the old Etruscan mirror. This is the Bacchus beloved of the Greek culture, the vigorous Dionysus in his childhood. In terrifying Eleusian mysteries he sits beside the fecund and bountiful Demeter and Corë, daughter of great Ceres. The child Bacchus in the arms of the swift winged god, as though Mercury, Prometheus’ interlocutor in the Aeschylean tragedy, were the conductor of a symbol of fertility and power.

Where does the scene in Ranvier’s painting take place?

We should believe that it is in Nysa, on the coast of Euboea, on the banks of one of the lyrical rivers that lent inspiration for the songs of the ancient poets, and where the foot of nymphs left hardly a trace.

In this painting there is a pure sky. Bacchus is not yet the triumphant child on the back of the lion—as later Venus will be set.

The bearded Silenus has not yet appeared to teach his favorite disciple. There is not yet the sound of thyrsi, cymbals, and other musical instruments, no dancing by the bacchantes.

Here, this child-Bacchus is learning to swim; he is bathed as he is held in the arms of a naked white nymph—I assume she is Mystis, whose long, luxurious hair is hymned in Greek verses, though Ranvier does not paint it. On the bank, among the leaves, there are other nymphs, also naked, white, and lovely.

Beautiful Mystis is poetic and meritorious, because she is the inventor of the vibrant bell, the gay rattle, and the ringing tabour; it was she who first cried “Euoi!” with joyous unction, and she was crowned with the cool crown of grapes from the virgin vine.

From the legendary painters to sovereign Velázquez, the brush has given Bacchus perpetual triumph. On amphorae his grapevine is preferred over Pan’s pea-vine; in bas-reliefs, the faun is his acolyte and the satyr his officer; in murals he makes the spreading grapevine bear fruit, and about him dance the bacchantes, called “Maenads,” or
the furious,
because of their mad frenzies. In his youthful aspect, he is painted with the belly of an ephebe, because in that way painting may reflect the verses of the Anacreontic ode, and when artists have wanted to give an idea of his poetic sovereignty and pomp, they have portrayed him as a serene and regal Bacchus—the Indic Sardanapalus—a Bacchus majestic and pontifical.

Ranvier’s subject is not new. Poussin’s
Education of Bacchus
is the greatest of this painting’s elder siblings. The name and deeds of the divine conqueror shall be an eternal subject for artists.

From the time of the first Greek poets until the greatest poet in the world, great Victor Hugo, Dionysus has always had an
Euoi!
and a crown of green grape leaves.

Before me I have Aristophanes’
Thesmophoriazusae,
or
Women at the Festival of Demeter,
and I read the following words, which are a hymn: “Do thou, oh divine Bacchus, who art crowned with ivy, direct our chorus; ’tis to thee that both my hymns and my dances are dedicated; oh, Evius, oh, Bromius, oh, thou son of Semele, oh, Bacchus, who delightest to mingle with the dear choruses of the nymphs upon the mountains, and who repeatest, while dancing with them, the sacred hymn, Euios, Euios, Euoi! Echo, the nymph of Cithaeron, returns thy words, which resound beneath the dark vaults of the thick foliage and in the midst of the rocks of the forest.”

The vulgar Bacchus, the drunken god, the patron of the intoxicated and the lost, that god appealed to by the late-night revelers of all times and places, is fat, lardy, with a belly full not, like the cicada, of dew, but wine—a heavy, red-faced, rotund epicurean Bacchus.

Ranvier’s painting portrays that lovable childhood among the soft pink flesh of guardian nymphs, beside a peaceful river that reflects a sweet, serene sky; and while there is precise truth in the way he treats the female bodies, with their firm fleshiness and their precise movement, under that sky that has all the light of reality, the atmosphere of the scene is no less ideal—a page from myth and eclogue, bathed in ineffable, delightful poetry.

On Himself

THE COLORS OF MY STANDARD

 

 

I must, at last, speak of my own work and of myself,
pro domo mea,
for a writer worthy of my reply and my respect has expressed certain judgments that I believe myself obliged to contradict. This writer is M. Groussac, and the judgments to which I refer have appeared in the most serious and aristocratic periodical in the Spanish language today:
La Biblioteca,
which is our own
Revue des Deux Mondes.
M. Groussac has proclaimed my modesty. It is true: before the authority of the masters, before superior spirits, I am modest and respectful. In the face of inept praise and censures, my modesty turns to absolute indifference. In the face of ineffable hostility—for example, the inoffensive sniff of a Galician snout that rummages in the fields of Córboba—my modesty is higher than Ossa upon Pelion.

M. Groussac has written, upon the publication of my book
Los Raros
(
The Misfits
), phrases that I must say delight me. He is not known to be facile or grandiloquent. Behind his back, timidly or angrily mutter herds of the wounded and the threatened. I have been relatively fortunate. What is there that is sweeter than honey or stronger than the lion? I have found honey in the mouth of the lion, and I have survived!

He must have perceived something in the part of the soul that comes out in the eyes [when I met him several years ago], for he has been very kind in his words. Had he been able to see even deeper he might have read this most intimate confession: “Sir, when I published my
Azure
. . . in Chile[ . . . ]the decadents had hardly begun to sharpen their quills in France. Verlaine’s
Sagesse
was yet unknown. The masters who have led me to the ‘mental gallicism’ that don Juan Valera accuses me of are a handful of Parnassians in verse, and you, in prose.”

Yes, Groussac, with his theater criticism for
La Nación
in Sarah Bernhardt’s first season was the man who taught me to write—for well or ill—the way I write today.

My success—it would be absurd not to confess it—has been due to novelty. And this novelty, what has it consisted of? A mental gallicism. When I read Groussac I did not know he was a Frenchman writing in Spanish. But he taught me to
think in French
; after that, my young, happy heart claimed Gallic citizenship.

In truth, I live on poetry. My dreams have a Solomonic magnificence. I love beauty, power, grace, money, luxury, kisses, and music. I am naught but a man of art. I am good for nothing else. I believe in God, and I am attracted to mystery. I am befuddled by daydreams and death; I have read many philosophers yet I know not a word of philosophy. I do espouse a certain epicureanism, of my own sort: let the soul and body enjoy as much as possible on earth, and do everything possible to continue that enjoyment in the next life. Which is to say that
je vois la vie en rose.

My adoration for France was, from my first spiritual steps, deep and wide. My dream was to write in French. And I even perpetrated certain verses in that language; they merit forgiveness, for I have not repeated that error. . . . As I penetrated into certain secrets of harmony, of nuance, of suggestion that one finds in the language of France, I believed I might discover those same secrets in Spanish, or apply them.

The oratorical resonance, the brasses of Castilian, its ardor—why could they not take on the intermediate notes and dress the indecisive thoughts that the soul tends most frequently to manifest itself by? After all, both languages are, in a way, made of the same stuff. As for the form, there are identical artifices in both. The evolution that might bring Castilian to that Renaissance would have to take place in the Americas, for Spain is buttressed and girded by tradition, walled in and bristling with Spanishness—“What no one will uproot from us,” says Valera, “no matter how hard they pull.” And so, thinking in French and writing in a Castilian that might have been praised by the pure Academicians of Spain, I published the little book that was to begin the current Latin American literary movement out of which, according to José María de Heredia, the mental renaissance of Spain also derived. And I tell you that since there is great sincerity and truth in all this, my modesty is intact.

Azure . . .
is a Parnassian book, and therefore French. For the first time in our language the Parisian “tale” appears, French adjectivization, the Gallic turn injected into a paragraph of classic Castilian: the trinkets and stage-dressings of Goncourt, the erotic
câlinerie
⁵⁸
of Mendès, the verbal compression of Heredia, and even a soupçon of Coppée.
Qui
pourrais-je
imiter pour être original?
⁵⁹
I asked myself. Why, everyone. From each I took what I liked, what suited my thirst for novelty and my delirium for art: the elements that would go on to constitute a medium of personal expression. And it turned out to be original. “You have stirred everything up in the alembic of your brain,” says the oft-quoted Valera, “and have pulled out of it a rare quintessence.”
Azure . . .
sounded the first note, then, and it found fortune in Spain and even in France, where Péladan openly imitated my
Song of Gold
in his “Cantique de l’Or,” which is the prologue to
Le Panthée.
. . .

In Europe I came to know some of the so-called Decadents in their work and in person. I met the good ones and the extravagant ones. I chose those whom I liked for the alembic. I saw that the useless ones fell, that the poets, the true artists, rose, and that satire made no headway against them. I learned the song of the panpipe from Verlaine and the music of his Pompadour clavichords. “If I could only bring all this into Spanish!” I said to myself. And from the bunch of grapes in the Latin Quarter I ate the freshest fruit, tasted that which was past its prime, and, as in the verses of cabbalistic Mallarmé, blew on the skin of the empty grape and looked at the sun through it.

I saw in the
salons,
among the useless acolytes and true failures, a few great poets and men of wisdom. It is from them that the
Revue des Deux Mondes
issues.

Grotesques there were, there still are. As there are in the Americas. . . . The Classics, the Romantics, and the Naturalists had them. The grotesque Classics produced a beautiful book by Gautier; the grotesque Romantics were Petrus Borel and company; there have been grotesque Naturalists even in Spain, grotesque Decadents, even in the Americas. Oh, you young men who call yourself Decadents because you imitate one or two gestures of some strange and exquisite poet—to be a decadent like the true decadents of France, you must know a very great deal, study hard, and fly high.

So who, then, are these Decadents?

In one of his latest epistles to
La Nación,
Doctor Schimper mentioned an entire conference, in Vienna, given over to the real name that should be given the modern artists who have come together under the light of the new art.

They have no special mark that would distinguish them as members of a particular school. Some seem Classicists, like Moréas, who leans toward Racine; others, pure Romantics; yet others, like Huysmans, seem offshoots of Naturalism and employ their own language and isolate themselves in an unmistakable way. Some, like Louÿs, are clearly Hellenists, or are Latinists, like Quillard; others, like Albert, do France the service of revealing the secrets of the literature of the North; others become “official” and go to the
Revue des Deux Mondes,
like Wyzewa or Régnier, whose entrance into the journal-foyer of the Académie does not surprise me, for if his father-in-law’s daughter published pieces there at the age of eleven, the wife’s husband might well do so at thirty.

And if Europe has stamped with the stamp of Decadence all those who have left the vulgar, common road—among us, in our language, M. Groussac,—the last
boulevardier
magazine writer to write with some care for his style would be a most egregious Symbolist. There are those among us, that is, who take Sarcey and Ohnet to be Decadents.